Who are the REAL Eco-terrorists, “TransCanada?!” “Eco-terrorism” is a word made up by the U.S. and Canadian Governments that is a contradictory term! “Eco” means habitat or environment, and “terrorism” is the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes. Peaceful protests and contacting your elected officials to ensure the safety and preservation of the environment, to include the people and wildlife in it, are called for by a plethora of environmentally-friendly organizations like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Rainforest Action Network. You cannot call these and dozens of other “eco-friendly,” grassroots organizations and millions of their supporters “eco-terrorists!” The TRUE “eco-terrorists” are the governments, including politicians, and the corporations (that run such governments through lobbyist money and bribery) who purposely destroy our environment for nothing more than pure GREED and power-hungriness! “Eco-terrorism” is a corporate-political process that uses fear tactics such as surveillance, unwarranted arrests and even cold-blooded murder to achieve its goal of human rights suppression for regional or global dominance!- John Loeffler, Fountain City, Wisconsin, U.S.A.

Further, the language in some of the documents is so vague that it could also ensnare journalists, researchers and academics, as well.

TransCanada also built a roster of names and photos of specific individuals involved in organizing against the pipeline, including 350.org‘s Rae Breaux, Rainforest Action Network‘s Scott Parkin and Tar Sands Blockade‘s Ron Seifert. Further, every activist ever arrested protesting the pipeline’s southern half is listed by name with their respective photo shown, along with the date of arrest.

More than two months after an aging pipeline cracked open, spilling more than 100,000 gallons of heavy crude oil into a Mayflower neighborhood and a cove of Lake Conway, Exxon Mobil still has not provided federal regulators with even a preliminary cause for the break and has not requested approval to resume transporting oil through that pipeline.

Exxon Mobil has neither updated its April 26 accident report filed with the federal agency nor asked to reopen the pipeline, which spilled an estimated 147,000 gallons of oil March 29, leading to the evacuations of 22 homes, dead and injured wildlife, several lawsuits, and federal and state investigations.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil has released this set of photos of the cleanup of a Lake Conway cove that was devastated by the Pegasus tar sands spill, calling them “before” and “after” photos. But the photos don’t actually show “before” when the area was an oil-free wetland wildlife habitat, and the “after” doesn’t show a restored wetland.

“These photos aren’t before and after – they’re mid-disaster and mid-cleanup,” says National Wildlife Federation South Central Representative Geralyn Hoey. “What does Exxon plan to do for wetland restoration? Are they going to try to recreate what was a thriving habitat for waterfowl, beavers, and other wildlife?”

Exxon’s celebratory news release doesn’t say. Exxon has released few details about exactly how it conducted the cleanup. Reporters were told to stop taking photos of the spill and also not to go anywhere near the site by an Exxon contractor (they moved to another location and kept taking photos). Especially since this was heavy, toxic tar sands oil, it’s impossible to say for sure if the oil is gone without taking samples several feet below the surface.

“These photos are a horrible reminder of what the people and wildlife in Mayflower have gone through and the high price to America of serving as the middleman as oil companies pipe Canadian tar sands to the international market,” says National Wildlife Federation South Central Representative Geralyn Hoey. It’s not just Arkansas – spills of toxic tar sands have fouled communities, waterways and wildlife habitat from Michigan to Missouri. A National Wildlife Federation-led coalition has asked two federal agencies to set stronger safety standards for tar sands pipelines.

But just last week, officials with British Columbia’s government told national authorities that the province wants nothing to do with the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline that would bring tar sands west for export. Officials said the tar sands industry has failed to answer questions about the impact of spills on clean water and the communities and wildlife that depend on them.

“If Canada doesn’t want to accept the risk of transporting Canadian tar sands, why in the world is Arkansas suffering for it?” asks Geralyn.

As President Obamaweighs whether to give the Keystone XL pipeline his approval, climate scientists have warned that the volume of greenhouse gases released by the pipeline could push the planet over a climate tipping point. Proponents of the pipeline — which would pump 900,0000 barrels a day of bitumen crude from Alberta’s boreal forests to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico — promise that the economic benefits far out weigh whatever environmental damage ensues. Touting jobs numbers that have long been debunked, a large portion of American labor leadership is still providing working-class cover for the project’s corporate backers.

Amidst the ongoing jobs-vs-environment debate, however, one voice is noticeably absent: the bitumen workers in Canada who are largely against long-term tar sands extraction and the building of the pipeline.

“We’re diametrically opposed to the construction of it,” said David Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP), which represents 35,000 Canadian oil and gas workers, including thousands laboring in the country’s tar sands. “The Keystone XL is not good for the economy, it’s not good for the environment, it violates all kinds of First Nations rights.”

The Canadian tar sands have been called the “most environmentally destructive project on earth”, with good reason. Extracting tar sands bitumen from under the boreal forests of Alberta, Canada requires huge amounts of energy and water. It has cleared vast tracts of forest, left scars on the land that are visible from space and threatened the health and livelihoods of indigenous First Nations communities across the region.

It is a well established fact that full exploitation of the tar sands is a grave threat to the climate. Emissions from tar sands extraction and upgrading are between 3.2 and 4.5 times higher than the equivalent emissions from conventional oil produced in North America.On a lifecycle basis, the average gallon of tar sands bitumen derived fuel has between 14 and 37 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than the average gallon of fuel from conventional oil.

But as bad as these impacts already are, existing analyses of the impacts of tar sands fail to account for a byproduct of the process that is a major source of climate change causing carbon emissions: petroleum coke – known as petcoke. Petcoke is the coal hiding in North America’s tar sands oil boom.

Petcoke is like coal, but dirtier. Petcoke looks and acts like coal, but it has even higher carbon emissions than already carbon-intensive coal.

On a per-unit of energy basis petcoke emits 5 to 10 percent more carbon dioxide than coal.

A ton of petcoke yields on average 53.6 percent more CO2 than a ton of coal.

Because it is considered a refinery byproduct, petcoke emissions are not included in most assessments of the climate impact of tar sands or conventional oil production and consumption. Thus the climate impact of oil production is being consistently undercounted.

Petcoke in the tar sands is turning American refineries into coal factories.

There is 24 percent more CO2 embedded in a barrel of tar sands bitumen than in a barrel of light oil.

15 to 30 percent of a barrel of tar sands bitumen can end up as petcoke, depending on the upgrading and refining process used.

Of 134 operating U.S. refineries in 2012, 59 are equipped to produce petcoke.

U.S. refineries produced over 61.5 million tons of petcoke in 2011 – enough to fuel 50 average U.S. coal plants each year.

In 2011, over 60 percent of U.S petcoke production was exported.

Keystone XL will fuel five coal plants and thus emit 13% more CO2 than the U.S. State Department has previously considered.

Nine of the refineries close to the southern terminus of Keystone XL have nearly 30 percent of U.S. petcoke production capacity, over 50,000 tons a day.

The petcoke produced from the Keystone XL pipeline would fuel 5 coal plants and produce 16.6 million metric tons of CO2 each year.

These petcoke emissions have been excluded from State Department emissions estimates for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Including these emissions raises the total annual emissions of the pipeline by 13% above the State Department’s calculations.

Cheap petcoke helps the coal industry.

As a refinery byproduct, petcoke is “priced to move”, selling at roughly a 25 percent discount to conventional coal.

Rising petcoke production associated with tar sands and heavy oil production is helping to make coal fired power generation dirtier and cheaper – globally.

“PetKoch”: The largest global petcoke trader in the world is Florida based Oxbow Corporation, owned by William Koch – the brother of Charles and David Koch.

Oxbow Carbon has donated $4.25 million to GOP super PACs, making it the one of the largest corporate donors to super PACs.

Oxbow also spent over $1.3 million on lobbyists in 2012.

To date, the impacts of petcoke on the local and global environment have not been considered by regulatory bodies in assessing the impacts of the tar sands. Petcoke’s full impacts must be considered by the European Union in its debate on the Fuel Quality Directive, by the U.S. State Department in its consideration of the climate impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline, and by Canadian, American, and European governments in tar sands policies across the board.

Increasing petcoke use is a clear result of the increasing production of tar sands bitumen. Petcoke is a seldom discussed yet highly important aspect of the full impacts of tar sands production. Factored into the equation, petcoke puts another strong nail in the coffin of any rational argument for the further exploitation of the tar sands.

Obviously, not all of these failures are on par with the massive spill in Mayflower, and it should be noted that there are a variety of reasons for these lines to fail. Some of these reasons, such as excavation activity in the vicinity of a pipeline, are not necessarily the fault of the pipeline’s operator. The fact that these incidents are commonplace, however, is not one that can be dismissed.

Pipeline incidents in the United States from 1/1/2010 through 3/29/2013. Source: PHMSA. Red Triangles represent incidents leading to fatalities, and yellow triangles represent those leading to injuries. To access the legend and other controls, click the “Fullscreen” icon at the top-right corner of the map.

It is clear from the map that there a few data entry errors, as a few of the data points draw in locations that aren’t even in the jurisdiction of the United States. However, each entry also contains a city and state that the incident is associated with, and for the most part, the data seem to be fairly reliable.

Despite lower prices at the pump, the biggest publicly traded oil companies in the world have raked in billions of dollars in profit over the past three months. According to their earnings reports released last week, the big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell—earned a combined $30.2 billion during the first quarter of 2013, or $331 million per day. Cumulatively, Big Oil profits were six percent lower than the first quarter of 2012 due to lower gasoline and oil prices, but these companies still earned a combined $229,832 every minute from January through March. This is more than what 95 percent of American households earn in an entire year.

Nearly one-third of these profits were used to repurchase companies’ stock, which only serves to pad the pockets of senior executives and the largest shareholders. The big five oil companies are also sitting on $82 billion in cash reserves, according to reports from the Securities and Exchange Commission for each company. While making these huge profits, BP and Exxon are the culprits in ongoing major oil disasters that are affecting the Gulf Coast and Arkansas.

Congress has yet to pass a single law to strengthen federal oversight of offshore oil and gas production. A year ago a Center for American Progress column, The Lasting Impact of Deepwater Horizon, highlighted the need for Congress to raise the preposterously low $75 million limit on liability that oil companies currently face for future oil blowouts. The cleanup costs for the 2010 BP disaster rang in at more than $14 billion at the end of 2012, according to the Congressional Research Service. This demonstrates the huge financial and environmental risks that face Americans if these liability limits remain so artificially low and the companies responsible for future disasters refuse to pay for cleaning up their messes.

On land, meanwhile, fellow oil giant ExxonMobil’s most recent spill dumped 500,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil near Mayflower, Arkansas, in late March 2013. The spill forced the evacuation of two dozen homes, and a massive cleanup is currently underway. Because this tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, is classified under the Superfund law as “diluted bitumen,” this and similar kinds of oil are exempt from the 8-cents-per-barrel fee that conventional oil must pay into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. This fund, created under the Superfund Act in 1980 and paid for by levying this tax on oil companies, pays for the oil-spill cleanup should a mishap occur. Exxon gets to avoid it.

This terrible oil-pipeline spill spewed tar sands oil similar to the oil that could be transported through the Keystone XL pipeline if it is approved by President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry. Pipeline discharges are a common event. NPR reported that, “Federal data show that on average over the past decade, nearly 3.5 million gallons of oil spilled from pipelines each year.” If Keystone XL moves forward, not only will Big Oil profit from its operation, it could eventually add to this spill tally.

The biggest three publicly owned U.S. oil companies—ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips—also paid relatively low federal effective tax rates in 2011. Reuters reported that their tax payments were “a far cry from the 35 percent top corporate tax rate.” It estimated that ExxonMobil’s effective federal tax rate in 2011 was 13 percent, Chevron’s was 19 percent and ConocoPhillips’s was 18 percent.

The oil and gas industry gave more than $70 million in federal campaign contributions during the 2012 cycle, with a whopping 90 percent going to Republican candidates. The big five oil companies spent nearly $50 million on lobbying Congress in 2012, or more than one-third of the entire oil and gas industry’s expenditures. A major goal of these political activities is to retain special tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, which add up to $40 billion over a decade. Despite ranking as some of the most profitable companies in the world, the big five oil companies receive $2.4 billion in tax breaks from Congress each year, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. U.S. taxpayers should no longer foot the bill for antiquated, 100-year-old fossil-fuel subsidies that, upon conception, were meant to help a then-fledgling industry grow.

Big Oil argues that it needs these tax breaks for oil exploration and development. Yet the big five oil companies produced two percent less oil in the first quarter of 2013, according to their recent financial statements, compared to the same time last year. These companies each have several hundred idle offshore leases that could produce oil if they were to be developed, according to an analysis for Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA). Instead, these companies leave the leases undeveloped while sitting on billions of dollars of cash reserves.

Big Oil Benefits From Low Federal Royalty Rates on Public Lands

In addition to special tax breaks, Big Oil companies drill for oil and gas on public lands owned by all Americans while paying relatively little for what they produce from these areas. Oil companies pay a royalty for the oil and natural gas that they extract from these federal places: A law from the 1920s requires the oil and gas industry to pay “not less than” a 12.5 percent royalty on oil and gas produced from onshore public lands. This rate has not been permanently increased in nearly 100 years, despite the fact that there is nothing preventing Congress or the Obama Administration from doing so.

The federal royalty for oil and gas production on public lands is much lower than what is paid to some states and private landowners for oil taken from their lands. The state of Texas, for example, assesses up to a 25 percent royalty for oil produced from its lands. North Dakota has a royalty of 18.8 percent, while Wyoming’s rate is at least 16.6 percent. Royalties for oil taken from private landowners nationwide are estimated to average 18.8 percent.

Higher royalty rates on federal public lands would ensure that Americans receive more compensation for oil companies’ use of their lands and minerals, which is all the more important in this time of fiscal uncertainty. The Department of the Interior should finalize plans to significantly raise the royalty rate for oil and gas produced on public lands.

Conclusion

The five biggest oil companies are making tens of billions of dollars in profits, while paying artificially low, ineffective federal tax rates and low royalties for taking and producing oil and gas owned by all Americans. In addition, companies can evade payments into the oil-spill cleanup fund based on specific categorizations of different kinds of petroleum. Meanwhile, they continue to make billions of dollars in profits every quarter while receiving special tax breaks from Congress.

“Bauer also will play that role for Obama’s new political network, Organizing for America, and the Democratic National Committee, which is administering the network,” explained a Feb. 2009 article in Politico, “Bauer’s new, unmatched legal power.”

In its Aug. 2011 Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS), the State Department said that rail currently has the capacity to transport over 1 million barrels of tar sands per day to market.

“Even in a situation where there was a total freeze in pipeline capacity for 20 years, it appears that there is sufficient capacity on existing rail tracks to accommodate shipping…through at least 2030,” the SEIS explained. “[S]tatistics from the Department of Transportation,…conservatively estimated that the existing cross-border rail lines from Canada to the U.S. could accommodate crude oil train shipments of over 1,000,000 bpd (barrels per day).”

As a case in point, BNSF is eager to see KXL fail, seeing it as an economic opportunity of epic proportions for its rails.

“We’re very concerned this has flown under the public’s radar,” Peter LaFontaine of the National Wildlife Federationtold Bloomberg in a May 1, 2013 story. “The public doesn’t seem to have the same sort of attention for pipeline expansions as they do for pipeline construction. But we’re talking about a lot of crude.”

Cashing in on Destructive Game of Tar Sands “Whac-A-Mole”

In a Nov. 2012 article on rail serving as an alternative midstream method to pipelines for tar sands, Grist Senior Editor Lisa Hymas described the situation as one akin to a game of “Whac-a-Mole.”

“It’s like a big game of Whac-a-Mole, except what’s at stake isn’t a cheap teddy bear at Chuck E. Cheese but the health of the planet and civilization as we know it,” she wrote.

Rather than cashing in on juvenile toys with tokens gained from winning several rounds of Whac-a-Mole, though, Dunn and SKDK are gaining real-life tokens – fat wads of cash – cashing in on this high-stakes game of tar sands Whac-a-Mole.

Cleanup efforts are currently underway in four separate oil spills that have occurred in the last ten days.

On March 27th, a train carrying Canadian tar sands dilbit jumped the rails in rural Minnesota spilling an estimated 30,000 gallons of black gold onto the countryside.

Two days later a pipeline ruptured in the town of Mayflower, Arkansas, sending a river of Albertan tar sands crude gurgling down residential streets. And news is just breaking about a Shell oil spill that occurred the same day in Texas that dumped an estimated 700 barrels, including at least 60 barrels of oil into a waterway that leads to the Gulf of Mexico (stay tuned for more on that).

This week a Canadian Pacific freight train loaded with oil derailed, spilling its cargo over the Northwest Ontario countryside. Originally reported as a leak of 600 liters, the CBC reported on Thursday that the estimated volume of the spill has increased to 63,000 liters.

The accelerating expansion of Alberta’s tar sands has North America’s current pipeline infrastructure maxed out and, as a result, oil companies have been searching for an alternative way to move their product to market. As lobbying efforts around the stymied Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines intensify, oil companies have been quietly loading their toxic cargo onto freight trains.

There has been a marked boost in the rail transport of crude in the last three years as new extraction techniques increase production in the tar sands. According to Reuters, “U.S. trains carried 233,800 carloads of crude oil in 2012, more than double the 65,800 carloads transported in 2011 and dwarfing the 29,600 in 2010, according to figures from the Association of American Railroads.”

Meanwhile the Canadian Pacific Railway’s crude oil volumes have skyrocketed from 2,800 carloads in 2010 to a staggering 53,000 last year. The company hopes to increase that number to over 70,000 this year.

Most, if not all, advocates of pipeline transportation will argue that the growing use of rail transport emphasizes the urgent need for pipelines. Pipelines are commonly touted as a more reliable mode of fuel transport than rail.

Pipelines, as the story goes, are safe.

Unfortunately for pipeline proponents, last week’s pipeline rupture in Arkansas is no anomaly in the history of US pipelines. In fact, pipelines have made a pretty consistent mess throughout the States for the last 20 years. One thing has changed, however: those messes are getting more expensive to clean up.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) is responsible for reporting and recording all “significant pipeline incidents” which are all incidents exceeding the cost of $50,000 (in 1984 dollars).

In terms of property damage PHMSA records indicate that the 20-year average (1993-2012) cost of significant pipeline incidents is over 318 million dollars, the 10-year average (2003-2012) cost is over 494 million dollars the 5-year average (2008-2012) cost is over 545 million dollars and the 3-year average (2010-2012) cost is over 662 million dollars.

The cost of cleaning up after pipelines just keeps getting more expensive.

Over the last 20 years, pipeline incidents have caused over $6.3 billion in property damages. On average during this time period there were more than 250 pipeline incidents per year, without a single year where that number dropped below 220. During that time, more than 2.5 million barrels of hazardous liquids were spilled and little more than half of those spilled amounts were recovered in cleanup efforts.

One of the factors contributing to the cost of cleanup is the introduction of Alberta’s diluted bitumen to southern markets (The most expensive year on record is 2010 when Enbridge spilled 3.3 million liters or 877,000 gallons of dilbit into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River).

Companies eager to move Canadian dilbit south to refineries and export facilities have been jimmying an aging pipeline infrastructure to handle the more corrosive substance and there is currently no federal oversight to monitor this process.

ExxonMobil’s sixty-five-year-old Pegasus pipeline that ruptured last week was one such retrofitted line. Built in the late 1940s, the old winged horse of a pipeline was reversed in 2006 in order to carry Canadian dilbit to the Gulf Coast via Illinois at a 50 percent increased capacity. The burst line sent a river of at least 84,000 gallons of dilbit running down residential streets in Mayflower and into nearby wetlands.

The exact cause of the pipeline rupture is still unknown.

Many of the major pipeline operators – like Exxon, Enbridge and TransCanada – have been cited for lax inspections, shoddy emergency preparedness, and ineffective spill management and response. Both Exxon and Enbridge have been told their actions in the immediate hours after pipeline ruptures have made spills worse than necessary.

NPR reports “more than half of the nation’s pipelines were built before 1970. More than 2.5 million miles of pipelines run underground throughout the country.”

Debbie Hersman with the National Transportation Safety Board told NPR, “100 percent of the accidents that we’ve investigated were completely preventable.” In many cases companies performed inspections and discovered cracks and corrosion in the line but did not perform repairs before accidents occurred.

In an interview with Reuters, John Stephenson, vice president and portfolio manager at First Asset Investment Management in Toronto described these events as “not good for producers…not good for Canadian oil going south…not good for Keystone.”

But added, “the reality is this oil is going to make it south of the border, quite likely by rail or one of the other pipelines across the Canadian-US border, so I see it as a short-term hiccup at worst.”

Yet even a cursory glance at the history of pipeline accidents in the US shows what is happening in Arkansas is no ‘hiccup’ and will bear no ‘short-term’ consequences. At least, not for the residents of Mayflower.

A tax loophole exempting tar sands pipeline operators from paying an eight-cent tax per barrel of oil they transport in the US is costing the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund millions of dollars every year. With expected increases in tar sands oil production over the next five years, this loophole may have deprived US citizens of $400-million dollars worth of critical oil-spill protection funds come 2017.

According to a report by the USNatural Resources Committee the federal government pays for immediate oil-spill response from the Liability Trust Fund which is supported by an excise tax on all crude oil and gas products in the US.

But in 2011 the Internal Revenue Service exempted tar sands oil from the tax, saying the substance did not fit the characterization of crude oil.

This exemption has come under scrutiny this week after Exxon Mobil’s Pegasus pipeline ruptured in Mayflower, Arkansas, releasing 300,000 litres of tar sands oil and water into a residential neighbourhood and surrounding wetlands. Because the line carried tar sands-derived oil from Alberta, Exxon was exempt from paying into the spill liability fund for the corrosive fuel’s potential cleanup.

The Pegasus pipeline was built in the 1940s to carry regular crude north from the Gulf Coast. In 2006, Exxon reversed the flow of the 1300 kilometre line in order to transport tar sands diluted bitumen from Illinois to the coast.

According to the Natural Resources Committee, “the spill response fund is currently at risk from running out of money because of the combined costs of BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill and Enbridge‘s Kalamazoo spill of tar sands oil…And Enbridge could still file a claim against the fund to recoup some of its costs because the company has spent well over the liability cap of $350 million for such spills.”

The Enbridge disaster in Michigan’s Kalamazoo river has cost over $820 million, making it the most expensive onshore cleanup in US history.

Enbridge, the company currently vying to build a 1172 kilometre-long pipeline from Alberta to the British Columbia coast, currently has no spill-response plan – for either onshore or offshore spills – prepared for the project.

During cross-examination in the Northern Gateway Pipeline hearings in BC, Enbridge admitted they will have no spill response plan until six months before the proposed tar sands line will begin operation.

An investigation in the Enbridge Kalamazoo disaster found the company – due to “pervasive organizational failures” – improperly respond to the pipeline breach. The US National Transportation Safety Board likened Enbridge employees to the Keystone Kops – a clumsy, incompetent troups of cops from the silent films of the early 20th century.

The estimated cleanup cost for conventional oil run at about $2000 per barrel of oil. Tar sands diluted bitumen cleanup is estimated to cost an average $29,000 per barrel of spilled oil.

The Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund was established in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, when the enormous costs of oil spill recovery were first understood on a grand scale, to ensure adequate cleanup funds were available to protect local residents and ecosystems.

As Climate Progress reported in 2010, Exxon refused to shoulder the cost of cleanup in the Valdez, where more than 11 million gallons of crude oil contaminated almost 3000 kilometres of shoreline.

“Exxon fought paying damages and appealed court decisions multiple times, and they have still not paid in full. Years of fighting and court appeals on Exxon’s part finally concluded with a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2008 that found that Exxon only had to pay $507.5 million of the original 1994 court decree for $5 billion in punitive damages. And as of 2009, Exxon had paid only $383 million of this $507.5 million to those who sued, stalling on the rest and fighting the $500 million in interest owed to fishermen and other small businesses from more than 12 years of litigation.

Twenty years later, some of the original plaintiffs are no longer alive to receive, or continue fighting for, their damages. An estimated 8,000 of the original Exxon Valdez plaintiffs have died since the spill while waiting for their compensation as Exxon fought them in court.”

The US is facing a dramatic increase of tar sands oil imports. As the National Resource Committee estimates, production in the Alberta tar sands is projected to rise to over 2.7 million barrels per day in 2017. The tar sands industry projects figures as high as 5 million barrels per day in 2030 and 6 million per day in 2035. Currently approved projects have the capacity to produce 5.2 million barrels per day.

“Tar sands is already the dirtiest, riskiest oil around. It shouldn’t get a free ride from the U.S. taxpayer when it comes to paying into this vital spill response fund,” said Rep. Markey, the Ranking Member of the Natural Resources Committee. “Oil companies already receive outrageous tax subsidies that total billions of dollars and there is no defensible reason for this oil spill free ride to be added to that dubious list of loopholes.”

Regardless of how many barrels of tar sands oil will be traversing US soil, none of them should be exempt from spill liability taxes. If anything, corrosive diluted bitumen should be taxed more for the inherent dangers it present to local ecologies and communities during its production, refining, and transport.

UPDATES COMING PENDING FURTHER INFORMATION.Enbridge‘s Line 2 **Line 67 tar sands** pipeline has leaked an estimated 600 gallons of crude oil at its pump station near Viking, Minnesota. Line 2 was built in 1956 and has a history of spills. Regulators ordered Enbridge to reduce its Line 2 operating pressure in October 2010 following the company’s Kalamazoo River tar sands spill.

The Enbridge Viking pump station also receives oil from the Alberta Clipper (aka Line 67 pipeline) that carries heavy crude oil and tar sands bitumen from the Alberta tar sands region south from Hardisty to Superior, Wisconsin and refineries in the midwestern United States. It is unclear whether the product that spilled was tar sands-derived diluted bitumen. According to a link provided by Enbridge subsequent to this story’s original posting, Line 2 begins in Edmonton and carries petroleum products, including crude oil, from Edmonton to Superior. Both lines pass through the Viking pump station.

The U.S. Coast Guard National Response Center website reports the details of the incident, which happened last night:
“1044848”,”1044848″,”1044848″,”INCIDENT”,”23-APR-2013 17:09″,”THE CALLER REPORTED THAT A LEAK ON A PRESSURE TRANSMITTER RESULTED IN A RELEASE OF CRUDE OIL.”,”FIXED”,”EQUIPMENT FAILURE”,”23-APR-2013 15:45″,”18060 203TH ST NW”,”MN”,”VIKING”,”MARSHALL”,”ENBRIDGE ENERGY”,”SOIL”,”OIL: CRUDE”

DeSmog was alerted by the Indigenous Environmental Network, which is en route to the spill site to gather more information. Stay tuned for updates to this post below.

**This story originally reported that Enbridge Line 67 tar sands pipeline suffered the leak, but Enbridge subsequently confirmed the spill was on Line 2. DeSmog regrets the error.**

“Enbridge’s Line 6 pipeline, linking Griffith, Ind. to Sarnia, Ont., was shut down temporarily by American regulators last July following a rupture and spillage of more than 3 million litres of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River near Marshall, Mich. Three months later, the National Energy Board, which was monitoring the U.S. investigation, quietly ordered a 20 per cent pressure reduction on Enbridge’s Line 2 Canadian pipeline, which links Edmonton to Superior, Wis., along sections that contained pre-1970s flash-welded pipe.”

“Canadian regulators ordered Enbridge Inc (ENB.TO) to cut pressure on its 440,000 barrel per day Line 2 last October after raising concerns that the company might not be able to detect cracks in the oil pipeline. The National Energy Board’s order remains in effect. It restricts the pipeline, which runs from Edmonton, Alberta, to Superior, Wisconsin, to operating at 80 percent of normal pressure, according to documents provided by the regulator. The board said it was concerned that Enbridge might not be able to consistently identify cracks in pipes laid before the 1970s using flash-welding techniques.”